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World's Student Christian Federation. 
European Student Relief Series No. 8. 


YOUR CHRISTMAS, 
AND THEIRS. 


HRISTMAS is almost upon us; not a little of the old pre-War 
Christmas feeling has returned. Jkound common-room fires, in 
cheery studios, on the sports-grounds, even in whispered and 

contraband chats in the lecture-rooms, students, men and women alike, 
are discussing the good times the vacation will bring. In England, in 
Wales, across the Tweed, in the misty old streets around the Sorbonne 
and the Luxembourg, all through Italy and Switzerland, in the lands of 
the North, in Calcutta, Tokyo, Peking, Cape Town, Melbourne and 
New York, everywhere where there are students with only the barrier 
of examinations between them and the vacation, such confidences as 
these are over-heard. ‘‘ I’m off home on the 23rd. Hope my gun’s 
well oiled.’ ‘‘ My people are giving us a great time—theatricals, 
dancing, and all that sort of thing.’’ ‘I’m going with friends for 
winter sports.”’ ‘* Moi, je vais en Angleterre, je veux absolument voit 
le ‘ London fog’ !’’ The world seems one great game of puss-in-the- 
corner; everyone rushing wildly from where he is to where his neigh- 
bour was. | 

Or at home, what preparations there are for our return. What 
orderings from the grocer, what shoppings, what care and thought in 
planning and scheming for our happiness. Truly, Christmas is 
the communion of Peace on earth, and good-will to all men. But 
what of all this joyous ritual of Christmas, with its carols and its feast- 
ings, in the Universities of Central Europe, the very lands that gave 
birth to so many Christmas customs? There this feast is dead. There, 
there is no expectation ; no looking forward except with fear, no antici- 
pation except of hunger, no thought other than desolation. Yet there 
are students there too, aiming for the same ideals as our own, following 
the same paths in Arts and Sciences, children of great men who have 
left their work and their discoveries as a world-free legacy to learning, 
men and women with the same capacities for enjoyment, with the same 
need of food and sufficient clothing; and with their severe and fuelless 
winters an even greater need of warmth and comfort. Tens of thou- 
sands of students in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and 
Germany, in addition to their University studies, are working, when 
sufficiently lucky to find employment, as waiters in restaurants, wood- 
cutters in the forests, as teachers, typists and clerks in order to scrape 
together that bare 500 Kr. a month (equal to 10/- in English money), the 


very lowest amount on which life can be held together. Their clothes 
are thread-bare, patched and darned, their boots mere wrecks, lodging 
is at a premium, food scarce, bad, and, approximately, eleven times 
as dear as before the war. A cake of soap costs more than one-tenth 
of the average student’s total monthly income. These men and women 
come, in almost every instance, from homes that betore the war were 
comfortable; they knew the joys of sports, of travel, of home-coming, 
music and dancing. Now many of them are dying from sheer exhaus- 
tion and hunger, from illnesses which they cannot afford to cure, dying 
too, not seldom, by their own hands when circumstances have grown 
too baffling, and hope dies. 

Out of our comfortable suliiciency, can’t we send to them who 
lack everything ? Clothes we no longer use, a few shillings we should 
spend without thinking? Tive shillings—the price of a dance ticket, 
or a tie, or a box of chocolates, a lunch in town, or an upper circle seat 
at the theatre, what does it mean to us? Certainly nothing vital. What 
does it mean over there? It means that twenty practically starving 
men and women fellow-students can begin their grey day’s weary work 
with at least a cup of hot cocoa and a piece of good bread inside them. 
Put that fact in the balance with your new book or your friendly treat 
and weigh them for yourself. Or, as a Norwegian student wrote: “ Is 
it then so unthinkable, that we should give what we ourselves really 
need, if it will save our brothers’ lives ?”’ 

Tolstoy tells of the poor cobbler who dreamed that the Christ would 
visit his basement room, and waited eagerly the whole day following. 
He helped the old soldier crossing-sweeper, but no Christ came; he 
fed a poor woman with her baby, and gave her garments trom his small 
store, but still no Christ; he stopped two people quarrelling, and they 
went away down the street hand in hand, but the Christ came not. With 
the evening, perplexed and saddened, he nodded over his reading, and, 
as he looked, the dark cellar-room became suffused with light, and the 
shadow of the crossing-sweeper passed across and said, ‘‘ Twas I,”’ 
and the shadow of the poor mother said, ‘‘’ Twas I,’’ and the shadow 
of the reconciled ones said, ‘‘’Twas I.’ As the season of good-will 
fills our rooms with light, it will be the shadow of a fellow-student saved 
from despair, which, this year, even more than the faces of those we 
love, passing across, will speak to us of the Giver of all Fellowship. 

December, 1920. 


All gifts raised by National Student Relief Committees for the 
World’s Student Christian Federation [European Student Relief 
Scheme should be sent to the Treasurer, M. Louis Hess, 13, Avenue de 
Champel, Geneva, Switzerland. 


JOHN &. MOTT, CONRAD HOFFMANN, RUTH ROUSE, 


Chairman, Executive Secretary, Publicity Secretary, 
347, Madison Avenue, 13, Avenue de Champel, 28, Lancaster Road, 


New York City. Geneva, Switzerland. Wimbledon, London, §.W. 19, 


